Apology Letter of Love & Pain From Your Wife

by Jane
(Texas)

When someone dies it is difficult to express sympathy, especially when it is someone you have not been close to or have been estranged from for quite sometime. This is how I feel.

This letter is for you Ashton. I want to express my sympathy for crushing your tender heart. I hope my words reach out to you clearly so that you may know just how I feel for you and that I am painfully aware of the magnitude of my transgressions against you and our marriage.

I have waited too many months to send this to you because of the difficulty I have had in accepting or understanding my horrific wrongdoings towards you. It is my shame that brings me to this moment, a shame and pain that I find too much to bear.

My love,

I have never loved anyone as much and as true as I love you. I have always regarded our relationship and love for each other as pure.

In committing the most painful of all personal offenses, you surely believe that I have not loved you as deeply as I say. That is understandable. I have been searching and searching constantly for a cause or reason for my behavior. There is no justification, no cause. What I have done is the most destructive of all behaviors. This is not the devoted wife you once knew. The woman you married is not here anymore. She checked out and the man she married is gone. Truly gone.

I am so sorry.

When you told me years ago, on the beach, that you felt something big was about to happen, I thought you meant something like world starvation, something financial or worse, in my mind, the death of a loved one, a child.

You have always been innately intuitive. I trusted every time you felt your intuition in high gear and I listened to you intently. You have that special capability – something that has always fascinated me about you. You never said what was going to happen. You stopped short of giving an answer. Could it be you were feeling your past creeping up behind you, slowly? Like a sloth headed towards its habitat, your heart? Past? Our future?

I don’t know what it was that made me so uneasy. It was difficult for me to hear. You never finished your thought. Later, you told me you felt you could shed your skin and run away. I thought you felt somewhere between liberating yourself somehow or you were needing a change in your life. Perhaps a drastic overhaul, that maybe did not include me in your life. I thought about it a lot. Then, I started to reflect on your Sunday Talks.

I love you.

For years you would ruminate on what you thought were your failures, feeling down, isolated. I thought you were so unaware of your worth, I still do. I replied with encouragement. I told you how smart you are and how much you had to offer and how you are a good husband and father. I told you that you are a really great doctor and that you have saved many lives. Patients whom you have saved came to me and told me about what a great doctor and man you are. You would tell me of the ones you lost. You told me you didn’t make enough money and you told me you were uncertain of yourself. I never agreed on any of the negative.

At one point, (among many things you shared with me), you stopped the Sunday Talks. It was just a small beginning of the changes you would make.

Slowly, I felt you were perhaps, tired of caring about me. You stopped calling me at work. For whatever reasons you had, it stopped. Soon you stopped making sure I made it to work safely. Then came the worst of the worst. You shut down.

You had no idea I was present while I was fully present. Your response was either anger, and frustration or you were vacant. You turned to playing Words with Friends with your accountant – someone I did not want you to play with. I begged you not to do it.

Any husband who cared about his wife’s feelings would have said, “If it bothers you that much my dear, then I will stop. It is not worth hurting you over.” You did not and you continued over the last five years. You ignored me completely.

In my eyes and heart, I was full on rejected. I realized I had to work harder to get to you, but to no avail. I was worn out trying to get you to notice me in every way. Sexy nightgowns and the stockings you liked so much on other women but when I wore them you never acknowledged or commented on them. I realized quickly those things would not impress you.

I expressed concerns, shared my anxiety over certain issues that plagued me, things that meant something to me and should have to you as well. You were removed. I witnessed a slow but steady decline in your being content with me.

I am sorry I broke your heart. I am so sorry.

I want you to know that I understand your pain now. Your past, your father, the abuse caught up with you. The Japanese concentration camp crept into my world and through you I suffered his and your pain.

It began before you met me. It was simmering and you kept it at bay by adding cold water to slow the full boil.

It didn’t matter. There clearly was nothing I could do for you. I believed you had let me go. You did not love me. You were so cold and cruel. Where did the cruelty come from? I know now.

The second-generation war camp victim you told me about seized you completely. You were officially an island. I couldn’t make the swim. I was lost. You were angry. We sat there together alone. We were a sad sight, a painful sight. It was so difficult for me knowing full well just how much I love you. After 20 years, I finally drowned.

In sorrow I slowly moved away from you. I got no positive response from you. I felt dead and you were clueless to my pain and to yours. I was extremely vulnerable and confused. You couldn’t see that and it was not your fault. I began to doubt you had love for me.

I am sorry for everything I put you through.

I became resentful and all of my insecurities flowed in like water into a sinking ship. I’m sorry. So, so very sorry my intuition was not on par for you. I left. I truly left us mentally.

Thinking back on working with you, it was a total disaster. You lashed out at me, the humiliating moments, the yelling at me in the office with both lawyers present, you were extremely impatient with me. I became resentful. I felt us not knowing anything but pain and sorrow. I became selfish. It was a primal instinct.

I wanted to survive the depths of torture my husband ensnared me with. I felt like I was losing my mind. Every thing I did was unsatisfactory. I just couldn’t do anything right. My soul was empty and yours was too. We didn’t recognize it because we had never been in such a dark place. Few words were shared and I stopped all the clocks with you.

I’m sorry I abandoned you. I love you.

At night I'd lie in bed, with you, in silence, sometimes crying; you never asked me why I was crying. You never comforted me. You had no feelings for me. I wasn’t thinking about what we were going through. I thought of all of the wonderful years we shared. How I missed your embrace. I lay there, in silence, wishing you would come back. Instead, in reality we were caught in a Cimmerian spiral.

All the while you had your accountant whom I believed had motives. I was right about her. There was a breach and you both betrayed me. Nights were for you and the game you played with her. Then came the day you told me you had been kissing her at night when you claimed you were at a mixer – acting like you were meeting people to build your business. Emotional affair? Absolutely!

Right now It doesn’t matter because this is my letter of apology.

You broke my heart and I still apologize.

Then came the horror I alone created. I cheated on you. I had an affair. I committed adultery. I am a bad wife. I made the choice to abandon ship. I am now a person of questionable integrity for life and guilty for what I did to you. Despicable, deplorable and full of rage and sorrow, I left your side.

I am sorry I for breaking our Bond. I left you disconsolate and I will suffer for both of us. There are no excuses for what I’ve done.

I can imagine your scorn for me. I am well aware that you may never find a time or place for us to reunite in a healthy marriage. It is my doing. My foul choice will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was my undoing that placed us here, in hell. I betrayed you and the children.

Ironically, all I’ve ever wanted is to give you all the love I have. I have so much of it to share with you.

My heart aches knowing I will lose you forever but why did you let me go? I supported you for years. I worked two jobs and sacrificed not being with my children on holidays, nights and weekends. I had been worthy of your love and you of mine. That has been obliterated.

You are all I ever wanted. I am sorry that I captured your heart only to set it free.